A machine's ability to communicate with humans in a natural manner remains a difficult problem. Cognitive research on human interaction shows that verbal communication, such as a person asking a question or giving a command, typically relies heavily on context and domain knowledge of the target person. By contrast, machine-based queries (e.g., questions, commands, requests, and/or other types of communications) may be highly structured and may not be inherently natural to the human user. Thus, verbal communications and machine processing of requests that are extracted from the verbal communications may be fundamentally incompatible. Yet the ability to allow a person to make natural language speech-based request remains a desirable goal.
Speech recognition has steadily improved in accuracy and today is successfully used in a wide range of applications. Natural language processing has been applied to the parsing of speech queries. Yet, current systems do not reliably provide a complete environment for users to submit speech and/or non-speech communications through natural language queries that are processed to provide natural responses. There remain a number of significant barriers to creation of a complete speech-based and/or non-speech-based natural language query and response environment.